Sans-titre, Circa 2010

Art Spiegelman   Famous Artists

Art Spiegelman first studied cartooning in high school before starting to draw professionally at age 16. He then studied art and philosophy at Harpur College.

An emblematic figure of the underground comic strip movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Art Spiegelman contributed to the magazines Real Pulp, Young Lust and Bizarre Sex. In 1980, Spiegelman founded RAW, the famous avant-garde comic book magazine, with his wife Françoise Mouly. "Maus" was originally published in the pages of "RAW" before being published by Pantheon. He taught the history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979 to 1986.
In 1985, it was as a creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum Co that he created the series of collectible cards "Garbage Pail Kids" which will exist the following year in France under the name "Les Crados" where it will win. A great success.
In 1980 he began “Maus”, the first volume of which was published in 1986. The rest and end of this story would come out in 1991. The work is based on the interviews between the author and his father, a survivor of the death camps. The narrative framework takes place on the one hand in New York at the end of the 70s, on the other hand in Europe from the 30s to 1945, presenting two interwoven narratives. This is the first time that a comic has drawn such critical attention to itself, describing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. “Maus” will be the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and will obtain in 1992 a special Pulitzer Prize.

In 2002 and 2003, Art Spiegelman published in various major European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit and The London Review of Books "In the Shadow of No Towers", where he recounts his experience of September 11 2001, and the effects this event had on him and on his compatriots. The album, released in the United States in 2004 by Pantheon Books, immediately gained worldwide critical acclaim. It was notably selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 notable books of 2004.
Spiegelman's work also includes a new edition of his 1978 anthology titled "Breakdowns."
McSweeney's has published a collection of three of his sketchbooks entitled "Be a Nose". A major exhibition of his work was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles as part of the exhibition “15 Masters of 20th Century Comics” (November 2005). In 2005, Art Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and in 2006 he was named to the Artist Directors Hall of Fame. He was appointed an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2007. The same year, he taught a seminar on the mastery of comics at Columbia University.
In the fall of 2011, Pantheon released “MetaMaus” which explains the genesis of “Maus”. “MetaMaus” received the 2011 National Jewish Book Prize in the categories Biography, Autobiography and Memoirs.
In 2015, he collaborated with the famous French artist JR on “The Ghosts of Ellis Island”. Spiegelman has also edited a book on artist Si Lewen titled "Si Lewen Parade: An Artist's Odyssey". In 2008, he published a children's book called “Jack and the Box”.
In 2011, Art Spiegelman won the Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, presiding over the 39th edition of the Angoulême Festival the following year. This honor also included a retrospective exhibition of his works, presented at the Center Pompidou and then at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Jewish Museum in New York and the AGO Art Gallery of Ontario. The exhibition catalog is “CO-MIX”. His project, WORDLESS !, A Multimedia Look at the History of the Graphic Novel, premiered at the Sydney Opera House in October 2013 and premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 2014. It was presented in France at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2018. In 2015, he was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His work has been published in numerous periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was an artist and writer from 1993 to 2003.
His numerous conferences given around the world explain the history and evolution of comics as well as the value and strength of this medium too often ignored or even despised. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of comics is on the rise, because "comics echo how the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not holograms, and people think in shards. of language, not in paragraphs.